As January 1st rolls around, out come all of the good intentions for the year ahead. I am an avid list maker and love nothing more than working my way through a tick list of things to do. Routine plays a huge part in our lives, home schooling needs to take priority for us and with me working from home I really need to have a strict scheduled time line of what happens and when.

Planners and diaries are essential items that are an integral part of every mums life and to be honest I find that I really do need more than one just to keep track of everything we have planned and everything that needs doing on a regular basis. I keep one diary for work schedules, deadlines and upcoming events to attend etc, then another diary for everything else, birthdays, family events, basically everything that involves home life. Both are left open on my desk so that I can combine both together and work out when I can spend extra time working (usually early hours of the morning or late at night) and when we can schedule in days out and treat time etc.

I tend to use my planner more for work, sorting out what posts I am going to do and now with a new year ahead I have so many ideas of projects that I would love to undertake. One of my main plans for 2019 is ramping up my baking and cooking, its something I really love to do so I am going to be starting a weekly challenge and also do more baking with the girls. We are going to be working on a family cookbook too which is something I have wanted to do for a long time, since I published my first book back in 2012. This is something that I know we all enjoy and even today we baked chocolate chip cookies from my book, so its good to know the recipes still work for us.

We find that if we write things down they tend to have a higher chance of being completed than if its just an idea! There really is nothing like ending the day with a fully ticked checklist of things you wanted to have done, its that sense of accomplishment that makes you carry on moving forward. Prep work is essential if you want things to run smoothly and I think its a small price to pay to be organised.